Why Would a Young Driver Choose IndyCar Over NASCAR?

If his first name was Chase, Reagan, Austin, Cole or maybe even Dakota, Spencer Pigot would have been a perfect fit to pursue his dream of becoming a professional racing driver by working his way up through one of NASCAR's various training series.

But with a passion for open-wheel racing, and specifically, a goal to become an IndyCar Series champion, the 19-year-old Californian has chosen a much harder path to turn that dream into reality.

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If I was his high school guidance counselor, I'd mention the greater earning potential NASCAR offers, the abundance of teams and sponsors looking for young talent to support and the odds being far more favorable of establishing a career in stock cars.

But Pigot, like many others who receive far less recognition while competing in IndyCar's junior leagues, wouldn't have it any other way.

"It's just something I've grown up watching throughout all my childhood," he said. "My dad is a huge IndyCar, Formula One fan and I always grew up watching the road course stuff. And I started racing go karts on the road courses, not ovals. The love for open-wheel and the Indianapolis 500, really, is the main reason I'm here on this path."

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The greatest challenge of being a young open-wheel racer has little to do with on-track competition. Unlike kids his age in NASCAR's farm system, Pigot must spend an inordinate amount of time in boardrooms searching for sponsorship.

Corporate backing is hard to find in any form of motorsport, but for smaller open-wheel series like USF2000 and Star Mazda, possessing skills in business and sales is possibly more important than being the most talented driver in the field.

"All the off-time between races is spent putting proposals together, looking for new sponsors because, unfortunately, that's how it is now," Pigot explained. "But with the Mazda Road To Indy scholarship package that Mazda provides, it's great, it does reward the talent and it rewards winning championships."

Pigot would have earned a free ride in the Star Mazda series for 2013 if he'd won the USF2000 championship, but after finishing second in the standings, he's now forced to search for the hundreds of thousands needed to buy a seat in the series.

"If you have a little bit of bad luck in the championship like I did this year and you finish second, you have to gain the sponsors, you have to gain the partners to move onto the next season. As much as I'd always like to be able to win a championship and get the Mazda money to move up, it's not realistic for everyone to plan on having it."

Although Pigot doesn't begrudge the easier time his NASCAR counterparts have at finding sponsorship dollars and teams that are hiring, it's hard to ignore the different realities our future open-wheel and stock car champions face.

"When we sit down with companies and individuals we really have to talk them through exactly what we're doing and what each level brings and how it's going to further develop me as a driver and improve myself so one day I'll be ready for IndyCar," he said. "So it's definitely a little more challenging because it's not such a mainstream sport at the lower levels. Everyone knows high school football, college football, all the levels you go through in other sports, but it's quite a lot different in racing.

"And all of us young open-wheel guys would love it if we had one sponsor that would just say, okay, we're going to take you through all the levels, we're going to fund you throughout your career and bring you all the way to IndyCar. That would be a dream come true. But also that's very unrealistic, so it is a challenge. My dad and I work on it all the time. And I think it is fun sometimes to go out there and pitch companies and talk to them and see their expressions and get a lot of people saying, 'No, no, I don't think we're going to do it,' but when you get that one who says, 'Yeah, I'm going to help you,' it makes all the hard work worth it."

Despite facing a tougher road to get to the top, Pigot says racing fans can look forward to a healthy crop of talented Americans (and Europeans) that are just a few years away from becoming IndyCar's next-generation stars.

"I think they should be very excited," he affirmed. "If they're fans of IndyCar, or racing in general, hopefully we're the future of the sport. And most of the time, actually, the racing at the junior levels is more exciting sometimes than the IndyCar races. You can watch some really exciting racing because there's lots of dicing, there's lots of passing, the cars don't have so much downforce that it's almost impossible to pass, but we do, we put on a really good show. So we definitely hope to have their support, but we also provide a lot of entertainment as well while we're preparing to make it to IndyCar, hopefully."